Privacy Policy

We are committed to protecting your personal information.

We are committed to protecting your personal information. This page, together with our terms and conditions and our cookies policy, sets out the basis on which we will process any personal information we collect from you, from published sources and public registers, or that you provide to us.

Any questions regarding this site and our privacy policy should be sent to the Advocacy Focus, 1st Floor, The Old Tannery, Eastgate, Accrington, Lancashire, BB5 6PW or by email to [email protected].

About Advocacy Focus

This site is operated by or on behalf of Advocacy Focus. We are an independent charity which has been offering free advocacy support since 1998.

We work with people with a variety of mental health, health or social care needs, communicating on their behalf their desires or wishes to the relevant service.

Our registered charity number is 1086151 in England and Wales. Our company limited guarantee number is 4135225.

You can contact us:

by post, using the postal address given above

using our website contact form

by telephone, on 0300 323 0965 from 9am – 5pm Monday to Friday

by email, using the email address given above

This document was created with the help of SEQ Legal.

Collecting personal information

We may collect, store and use the following kinds of personal information:

information that you provide to us for the purpose of subscribing to our email notifications and/or newsletters (including your name and email address);

information that you provide to us when using the services on our website, or that is generated in the course of the use of those services (including the timing, frequency and pattern of service use);

information relating to any transactions or donations that you enter into through our website (including your name, address, telephone number, email address and card details);

any other personal information that you choose to send to us.

Before you disclose to us the personal information of another person, you must obtain that person's consent to both the disclosure and the processing of that personal information in accordance with this policy.

Using personal information

Personal information submitted to us through our website will be used for the purposes specified in this policy or on the relevant pages of the website.

We may use your personal information to:

administer our website and business

personalise our website for you

enable your use of the services available on our website

send you non-marketing commercial communications

send you email notifications that you have specifically requested

send you our email newsletter, if you have requested it (you can inform us at any time if you no longer require the newsletter)

send you marketing communications relating to our business which we think may be of interest to you, by post or, where you have specifically agreed to this, by email or similar technology (you can inform us at any time if you no longer require marketing communications)

provide third parties with statistical information about our users (but those third parties will not be able to identify any individual user from that information)

deal with enquiries and complaints made by or about you relating to our website

keep our website secure and prevent fraud; and

verify compliance with the terms and conditions governing the use of our website

If you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence. We may ask you to complete surveys that we use for research purposes, although you do not have to respond to them.

We will not, without your express consent, supply your personal information to any third party for the purpose of their or any other third party's direct marketing.

We will share information with our payment services provider only to the extent necessary for the purposes of processing payments you make via our website, refunding such payments and dealing with complaints and queries relating to such payments and refunds.

Disclosing personal information

We may disclose your personal information to any of our employees, advocates, trustees, partners, professional advisers or legal team insofar as reasonably necessary for the purposes set out in this policy.

We may disclose your personal information:

to the extent that we are required to do so by law

in connection with any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings

in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk)

to any person who we reasonably believe may apply to a court or other competent authority for disclosure of that personal information where, in our reasonable opinion, such court or authority would be reasonably likely to order disclosure of that personal information.

Except as provided in this policy, we will not provide your personal information to third parties.

Retaining personal information

This section sets out our data retention policies and procedure, which are designed to help ensure that we comply with our legal obligations in relation to the retention and deletion of personal information.

Personal information that we process for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.

Security of personal information

We will take reasonable technical and organisational precautions to prevent the loss, misuse or alteration of your personal information.

We will store all the personal information you provide on our secure password and firewall-protected servers.

All electronic financial transactions entered into through our website will be protected by encryption technology.

You acknowledge that the transmission of information over the internet is inherently insecure, and we cannot guarantee the security of data sent over the internet.

Amendments

We may update this policy from time to time by publishing a new version on our website. You should check this page occasionally to ensure you are happy with any changes to this policy.

Your rights

You may instruct us to provide you with any personal information we hold about you; provision of such information will be subject to:

the payment of a fee (currently fixed at £10); and

the supply of appropriate evidence of your identity (for this purpose, we will usually accept a photocopy of your passport certified by a solicitor or bank plus an original copy of a utility bill showing your current address).

We may withhold personal information that you request to the extent permitted by law.

You may instruct us at any time not to process your personal information for marketing purposes.

In practice, you will usually either expressly agree in advance to our use of your personal information for marketing purposes, or we will provide you with an opportunity to opt out of the use of your personal information for marketing purposes.

Third party websites

Our website includes hyperlinks to, and details of, third party websites. We have no control over, and are not responsible for, the privacy policies and practices of third parties.

Updating information

Please let us know if the personal information that we hold about you needs to be corrected or updated.

Cookies

Our website uses cookies. A cookie is a file containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that is sent by a web server to a web browser and is stored by the browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.

Cookies may be either "persistent" cookies or "session" cookies: a persistent cookie will be stored by a web browser and will remain valid until its set expiry date, unless deleted by the user before the expiry date; a session cookie, on the other hand, will expire at the end of the user session, when the web browser is closed.

Cookies do not typically contain any information that personally identifies a user, but personal information that we store about you may be linked to the information stored in and obtained from cookies.

We use both session and persistent cookies on our website. The names of the cookies that we use on our website, and the purposes for which they are used, are set out below:

We use cookies to recognise a computer when a user visits our website and to track users as they navigate the website.

We use cookies to improve the website's usability, administer the website and improve the security of the website

We also use cookies to facilitate the use of our website search engine

Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies; for example:

in Internet Explorer (version 11) you can block cookies using the cookie handling override settings available by clicking "Tools", "Internet Options", "Privacy" and then "Advanced";

in Firefox (version 47) you can block all cookies by clicking "Tools", "Options", "Privacy", selecting "Use custom settings for history" from the drop-down menu, and unticking "Accept cookies from sites"; and

in Chrome (version 52), you can block all cookies by accessing the "Customise and control" menu, and clicking "Settings", "Show advanced settings" and "Content settings", and then selecting "Block sites from setting any data" under the "Cookies" heading.

Blocking all cookies will have a negative impact upon the usability of many websites. If you block cookies, you will not be able to use all the features on our website.

in Firefox (version 47), you can delete cookies by clicking "Tools", "Options" and "Privacy", then selecting "Use custom settings for history" from the drop-down menu, clicking "Show Cookies", and then clicking "Remove All Cookies"; and

in Chrome (version 52), you can delete all cookies by accessing the "Customise and control" menu, and clicking "Settings", "Show advanced settings" and "Clear browsing data", and then selecting "Cookies and other site and plug-in data" before clicking "Clear browsing data".

Deleting cookies will have a negative impact on the usability of many websites.

All of our team members at Advocacy Focus provide professional service combined with specialist skills. We offer friendly, accessible and high quality advocacy right across our team of dedicated staff, volunteers and trustees.

All of our team members at Advocacy Focus provide professional service combined with specialist skills. We offer friendly, accessible and high quality advocacy right across our team of dedicated staff, volunteers and trustees.